Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine was an English-born writer whose pamphlets helped start one revolution and defend another. His Common Sense of 1776 persuaded large numbers of American colonists that they should break with Britain entirely, and his Rights of Man of 1791 and 1792 answered Edmund Burke's attack on the French Revolution with a case for democratic government and social welfare. He wrote in plain, forceful language for ordinary readers, and his later attack on organised religion made him one of the most admired and most hated men of his age.

Paine was born on 9 February 1737 in Thetford, Norfolk, the son of a Quaker staymaker, a maker of the whalebone corsets worn by women, and an Anglican mother. He left school at about thirteen to learn his father's trade and spent the next twenty years drifting between jobs: staymaker, sailor on a privateer, teacher, tobacconist and, from 1762, an officer of the excise, collecting taxes on goods. His first wife died in childbirth in 1760, and a second marriage ended in separation.

In Lewes, Sussex, he joined a debating club and became known for his arguments. In 1772 he wrote a pamphlet calling for better pay for excise officers, and in 1774 he was dismissed from the service. That year in London he met Benjamin Franklin, who gave him letters of introduction, and he sailed for Philadelphia, arriving in November 1774 so ill with fever that he had to be carried off the ship.

In Philadelphia Paine found work editing the Pennsylvania Magazine. Fighting between colonists and British troops broke out in April 1775, but most Americans still hoped for reconciliation with the king. Paine's pamphlet Common Sense, published in January 1776, changed the terms of the debate. It attacked not only British policy but monarchy and hereditary rule as such, mocking the idea that an island should rule a continent, and called for an independent American republic with a representative assembly.

The pamphlet sold in enormous numbers, tens of thousands of copies within months and perhaps over a hundred thousand in the first year, although higher figures often quoted are hard to verify. It is widely credited with turning opinion towards the Declaration of Independence, adopted that July with words drafted by Thomas Jefferson.

During the American Revolution Paine served with the army and wrote a series of essays called The American Crisis. The first, published in December 1776 when the Continental Army was retreating and demoralised, began with the line "These are the times that try men's souls", and George Washington had it read to his troops. He served as secretary to the Congress's committee for foreign affairs until a quarrel over the diplomat Silas Deane forced his resignation in 1779, and helped raise money from France. After the war he was rewarded by Pennsylvania and New York, and he spent several years designing an iron bridge.

Paine returned to Europe in 1787 to promote his bridge. When Edmund Burke published his Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790, Paine replied with Rights of Man, in two parts in 1791 and 1792. He argued that every generation has the right to govern itself and cannot be bound by the arrangements of its ancestors, that rights belong to people by nature rather than by inheritance, and that legitimate government rests on a written constitution made by the people. Hereditary monarchy and aristocracy were, in his view, as absurd as a hereditary mathematician.

The second part went further, proposing what historians often see as an early plan for a welfare state: progressive taxation of large estates, public support for the education of poor children, pensions for the elderly and help for the unemployed, paid for by cutting the costs of monarchy and war. Cheap editions spread among working people in Britain, and the government responded by banning the book and charging Paine with seditious libel. He left for France in September 1792 and was convicted in his absence.

During the French Revolution Paine had been made an honorary French citizen, and he was elected to the National Convention in 1792, though he spoke little French. He sided with the moderate Girondins and argued that Louis XVI should be exiled to America rather than executed, which made him enemies among the Jacobins. In December 1793, during the Terror led by Maximilien Robespierre and his allies, he was arrested and held in the Luxembourg prison in Paris. He narrowly escaped the guillotine and was released in November 1794, after Robespierre's fall, when the new American minister, James Monroe, claimed him as an American citizen.

In The Age of Reason, published in parts in 1794 and 1795, Paine set out his deism, the belief in a single creator God known through reason and nature rather than through revelation. He attacked the Bible as a collection of contradictory human writings and churches as instruments of power. He did not consider himself an atheist, but many readers treated the book as an assault on Christianity itself. In Agrarian Justice of 1797 he proposed a fund, raised from inheritances of land, to give every person a sum of money at twenty-one and a pension from fifty, an idea sometimes seen as a forerunner of a basic income.

Paine bitterly blamed Washington for failing to help him while he was in prison and attacked him in print in 1796, losing many American friends. At Jefferson's invitation he returned to the United States in 1802, but found himself shunned as an infidel. He died in poverty in New York on 8 June 1809, and only a handful of people attended his burial on his farm at New Rochelle. Ten years later the English radical William Cobbett dug up his bones to give him a hero's grave in England; the plan failed and the remains were later lost.

Paine was less a systematic philosopher than a gifted popular writer who carried the ideas of the Enlightenment, natural rights, popular sovereignty and reason in religion, to a mass audience. He is counted among the founders of the United States, inspired British radicals and the Chartists in the nineteenth century, and has been claimed since by liberals, socialists and libertarians alike.